Decision Making During International Crises

An examination of the problems which national leaders face when they are involved in international crises, including stress, fatigue and communication difficulties. The majority of crises covered are post-1945, with others chosen to illustrate a particular constraint, such as July 1914.

How do nations act in a crisis? This book seeks to answer that question both theoretically and historically. It tests and synthesizes theories of political behavior by comparing them with the historical record. The authors apply theories of bargaining, game theory, information processing, decision-making, and international systems to case histories of sixteen crises that occurred during a seventy-five year period. The result is a revision and integration of diverse concepts and the development of a new empirical theory of international conflict. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book provides an analysis on the impact of culture on crisis management, exploring how different cultural types are reflected in crisis-related decision making patterns. Providing an interdisciplinary and international perspective with a rich research and practical outlook, this work is an important contribution to the field of crisis management and decision making. Offering essential understanding to how countries, organizations, groups and individuals prepare for and respond to crises thus combining research across several disciplines, offering theoretical development, empirical testing and reporting on the testing of a large number of hypotheses across several frameworks. The novelty of this book lies in its presentation of the quantitative testing of the relationship between cultural theory and crisis management, drawing on data from cases that cross continents and crises types. The book also includes a review of cases from South Korea and suggests a number of ways in which practitioners at various levels of government can prepare their organizations to cope better with the introduction of cultural bias into the decision making process. Those with an interest in risk management, disaster management and crisis management will value this pioneering work as it reveals the influence of cultural bias in decision making processes. This work offers important insights for practice as well as for theory-building, scholars and practitioners of public administration, management, political, and international relations, organizational, social and cultural psychology, amongst others, will all gain from reading this work.

Simulation-oriented scenarios.- Politics and administration during a 'nuclear-political'crisis.- Comments on 'The Chernobyl disaster and nuclear fallout'.- The Zeebrugge ferry disaster. Elements of a communication and information processes scenario.- Comments on "The Zeebrugge ferry disaster".- Riots without killings. Policy learning in Amsterdam 1980-1985.- Comments on "Riots without killings".- Interactive simulation and crisis management training. New techniques for improving performance.- Comments on "Interactive simulation and crisis management training".- Decision pathways from crisis. A contingency-theory simulation heuristic for the Challenger Shuttle disaster (1983-1988).- Contributors.

This volume addresses the question as to where international law fits into the making and implementation of foreign policy during an international crisis in which a State is considering and / or may actually use force. Empirical literature on the law-State behaviour relationship during international crises has not been able to answer this question adequately. The limitations of existing empirical literature are identified as stemming from the limitations of existing positivist, realist and functionalist theoretical explanations of the law-State behaviour relationship. These theoretical approaches, which underpin existing empirical literature on international crises, assume that international law matches what is referred to in this book as its ‘rule-book’ image. This is the notion of international law as a finite set of objective, politically neutral, rules that can be applied so as to distinguish objectively between legal and illegal action. The rule-book image of international law does not match reality, but the assumption that it is true underpins both theoretical literature and references to international law in political rhetoric. The rule-book image and the reality of international law have been reconciled within the theory of International law as Ideology (ILI) as developed by Shirley Scott. This book hypothesises that an ILI perspective offers a better explanation of the law-State behaviour relationship during international crises than rival explanations grounded in positivism, realism or functionalism. Four case studies of State behaviour—of the US, the Soviet Union and the PRC during the Korean War (1950-1953), of the US and UK during the Suez crisis (1956), of the US and the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and of the US and an alliance of Latin American States during the Dominican Republic crisis (1965)—are used to test the hypothesis. The findings confirm the greater explanatory efficacy of ILI and demonstrate that the significance of international law to foreign policy decision-making during international crises is more than that of deterring the use of force as is assumed by rival theoretical approaches grounded in a rule-book image of international law. International law is shown to serve as a vehicle for inter-State competition during international crises.

This book aims at gauging whether the nature of US foreign policy decision-making has changed after the Cold War as radically as a large body of literature seems to suggest, and develops a new framework to interpret presidential decision-making in foreign policy. It locates the study of risk in US foreign policy in a wider intellectual landscape that draws on contemporary debates in historiography, international relations and Presidential studies. Based on developments in the health and environment literature, the book identifies the President as the ultimate risk-manager, demonstrating how a President is called to perform a delicate balancing act between risks on the domestic/political side and risks on the strategic/international side. Every decision represents a ‘risk vs. risk trade-off,’ in which the management of one ‘target risk’ leads to the development ‘countervailing risks.’ The book applies this framework to the study three major crises in US foreign policy: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, and the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. Each case-study results from substantial archival research and over twenty interviews with policymakers and academics, including former President Jimmy Carter and former Senator Bob Dole. This book is ideal for postgraduate researchers and academics in US foreign policy, foreign policy decision-making and the US Presidency as well as Departments and Institutes dealing with the study of risk in the social sciences. The case studies will also be of great use to undergraduate students.